At the age of 21, Canadian pianist Jan Lisiecki has grown into a tall, slim young man, with long, pianist’s fingers and a mop of blonde hair. Seated at the keyboard – as he was on Wednesday (Feb 3) evening at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall, for an appearance with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra – he perches precariously on edge of the bench, and doesn’t quite seem to know what to do with his knees. Fortunately, he knows exactly what to do with his hands.

Let me begin with a question: what compositions from the orchestral repertoire can you name that are quite short? And please bear in mind that I’m talking about complete, self-standing works. Little movements from longer, multi-movement compositions don’t count.

Ravel’s Pavane pour une enfante défunt isn’t very long, clocking in at about six-and-a-half minutes. But I’m looking for pieces that are even shorter than that.

Stravinsky wrote some orchestral miniatures: his Circus Polka is about four minutes, and his Fireworks is even shorter, at about three-and-a-half minutes. And, of course, Webern wrote numerous miniatures for orchestra – although he usually conjoined them into multi-movement suites. As well, there’s Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man – although, strictly speaking, it’s not quite an orchestral work.

Looking for an intense, harrowing, body- and soul-churning experience? You could try skydiving. Or you could go scuba-diving with the sharks. Or you could go and see the Canadian Opera Company’s current production of Wagner’s Die Götterdämmerung.

Many of the singing actors in this production are not merely great vocalists, endowed with a deep understanding of Wagnerian style, they also display super-human qualities of strength an endurance. (In another opera, such performances might come across as excessive or self-indulgent – but Götterdämmerung is not another opera.)

In the musical world, Estonia is famous for its long-standing choral tradition. It’s a broad-based tradition: a form of cultural resistance spanning 800 years of foreign domination in the small Baltic nation. In the mid-19th century, the popular singing movement blossomed, with huge singing festivals and competitions. And in the 1980s, Estonian choirs sang patriotic songs forbidden by the Soviet authorities, in what became known as the “Singing Revolution,” leading to Estonian independence.

On Thursday last, I attended the Toronto Symphony’s “Year of the Rooster” program at Roy Thomson Hall. Celebrating the Chinese New Year has become a thing with the TSO – a fledgling tradition that’s now four years old.

For the occasion, the TSO played Chinese orchestral music (of course), under the baton of guest conductor Long Yu. And the concert served to illustrate the fact that “Chinese orchestral music” is a multifaceted rubric, held together by the combining of European and Asian approaches to creating music. Indeed, the program exposed both the benefits and the pitfalls of joining East and West in this way.

To my ears, one of the big pitfalls is the tendency for some Chinese composers to conflate simple melodies with big unison gestures. Traditional Chinese music isn’t layered in the way Western music is – yet the simultaneous interplay of different musical ideas is what a Western orchestra is designed to achieve. Committing all the players in an orchestra to a mono-layered idea is impoverishing and weak, no matter how many fortissimos the composer adds to the page.

Mozart’s Magic Flute is one of my favourite operas. And one of my reasons is that the piece encourages and inspires directors and designers to come up with novel and fanciful ideas about how to stage it. Unlike Tosca or Carmen, the Magic Flute is set in no specific place or time; the world it inhabits must be created from scratch every time it is mounted.

And the varied responses to Mozart and Schikaneder’s implicit invitation to be as inventive as possible seem to be limitless. I’ve never seen two Flutes that looked the same, or a production that struck me as hopelessly wrongheaded, in the way that directorial interventions sometimes can. (I even liked the Canadian Opera Company’s controversial 1993 staging, directed by Martha Clarke, that placed the opera in a shabby hotel in the early 20th century. Hearing Russell Braun, as Papageno, sing “Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja,” while holding a live chicken under his arm was worth the price of admission all by itself.)

Eatock Daily

I'm a composer and writer based in Toronto – and this is my classical music blog, Eatock Daily.

Here you'll find musings and meditations, some reviews and the occasional rant – as well as some of the articlesI've written for Toronto’s National Post and Globe and Mailnewspapers, the Houston Chronicle, the Kansas City Star and other publications.